I generally don't write or say much about incidents like the shooting at the Nebraska mall. Really, what is there to say?
Of course incidents like that affect me. I lived in Colorado during the shootings at Columbine high school; I had left Arkansas by the time the students were shot in Jonesboro, but I still felt a connection to that world. The Oklahoma City bombing also hit close to home--I had left Oklahoma, but my brother worked (still does) at a hospital there. At the time, I myself worked at a federal institution, and that was back in the days when physical security in public areas was minimal.
But in each case, I felt I really had nothing to offer to the discussion. The September 11 attacks in 2001 were just another instance where I felt no desire to say anything.
Similarly, I don't really know what to make of the Nebraska shooting, especially at this geographical and cultural distance. Nobody I see "out and about" has mentioned it to me personally. Some ladies at the gym alluded to it in a sort of "isn't that terrible way." However, they didn't know each other well enough to offer a statement that could be controversial--like "those Americans and their guns" or even "kids today."
Although Thunder Bay has its share of people who support the Canadian national gun registry, a few people also come from frontier stock just a generation or two back. The United Church as an institution generally favo(u)rs more gun restrictions; the congregation I go to supports that position but includes people who own a gun, wouldn't dream of getting rid of it, and think the registry is a waste of time and money.
Still, "all Americans love guns" is one of the less-often-spoken assumptions I come up against up here. I have a sense that Canadians assume that an American who doesn't own a gun would get one but just hasn't gotten around to it.
It's puzzling to me, all of it--the desire to own a gun, the assumption that Americans are gun-happy, the whole situation. Guns just aren't on my radar. I've never owned a gun--for all the swim meets I went to, I've never even shot a starting pistol. I'm not comfortable with it. I don't understand the desire to own a gun--what the hell would I do with a gun? Still, I don't think all people who do own them are horrible people just asking for trouble.
If anything, the local response to the shooting in Nebraska--and other shootings in other spots across the U.S.--may have been colo(u)red by an incident in Thunder Bay last spring. May 1, a local high school student threatened harm and caused the high schools to be locked down until he was found and arrested. At the time, I was just home from my father's illness and funeral, so I wasn't out in the community much. But I do know that there was some of the "how could that happen here?" surprise.
I wrote about the Nebraska shooting today because it's hard to allow large stories like that to pass without comment. But this is all I really have to say: I would hope, especially since that incident in May, that locals now see the Nebraska shooting in a different way--that the incident is not about guns per se, but instead is about desperate, unhappy young people in pain whose only tool for handling that pain is a gun.
And we, in our societies of plenty on both sides of the border, should be able to give everyone better tools than that.
Of course incidents like that affect me. I lived in Colorado during the shootings at Columbine high school; I had left Arkansas by the time the students were shot in Jonesboro, but I still felt a connection to that world. The Oklahoma City bombing also hit close to home--I had left Oklahoma, but my brother worked (still does) at a hospital there. At the time, I myself worked at a federal institution, and that was back in the days when physical security in public areas was minimal.
But in each case, I felt I really had nothing to offer to the discussion. The September 11 attacks in 2001 were just another instance where I felt no desire to say anything.
Similarly, I don't really know what to make of the Nebraska shooting, especially at this geographical and cultural distance. Nobody I see "out and about" has mentioned it to me personally. Some ladies at the gym alluded to it in a sort of "isn't that terrible way." However, they didn't know each other well enough to offer a statement that could be controversial--like "those Americans and their guns" or even "kids today."
Although Thunder Bay has its share of people who support the Canadian national gun registry, a few people also come from frontier stock just a generation or two back. The United Church as an institution generally favo(u)rs more gun restrictions; the congregation I go to supports that position but includes people who own a gun, wouldn't dream of getting rid of it, and think the registry is a waste of time and money.
Still, "all Americans love guns" is one of the less-often-spoken assumptions I come up against up here. I have a sense that Canadians assume that an American who doesn't own a gun would get one but just hasn't gotten around to it.
It's puzzling to me, all of it--the desire to own a gun, the assumption that Americans are gun-happy, the whole situation. Guns just aren't on my radar. I've never owned a gun--for all the swim meets I went to, I've never even shot a starting pistol. I'm not comfortable with it. I don't understand the desire to own a gun--what the hell would I do with a gun? Still, I don't think all people who do own them are horrible people just asking for trouble.
If anything, the local response to the shooting in Nebraska--and other shootings in other spots across the U.S.--may have been colo(u)red by an incident in Thunder Bay last spring. May 1, a local high school student threatened harm and caused the high schools to be locked down until he was found and arrested. At the time, I was just home from my father's illness and funeral, so I wasn't out in the community much. But I do know that there was some of the "how could that happen here?" surprise.
I wrote about the Nebraska shooting today because it's hard to allow large stories like that to pass without comment. But this is all I really have to say: I would hope, especially since that incident in May, that locals now see the Nebraska shooting in a different way--that the incident is not about guns per se, but instead is about desperate, unhappy young people in pain whose only tool for handling that pain is a gun.
And we, in our societies of plenty on both sides of the border, should be able to give everyone better tools than that.
